I am an English Language Fellow providing teacher training workshops and feedback to teachers in Kyrgyzstan so as to make their classes more interactive and fun.
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Friday, June 28, 2013

June 17, 2013

I woke up much earlier than I wanted to and found that Willoughby
had been quietly knitting at her berth waiting for me to wake so we could drink
coffee. She told me two other passengers had boarded our compartment in the
middle of the night and upon getting to the upper berths, immediately shut the
window.

I consulted Willoughby about tipping Elvira, our waitress,
for saving us the hassle of having to walk through six cars to get to the
dining car. We agreed on 500 rubles with each one of us sharing one half.

Now that the sleeping portion of the train ride was over, I
changed into a long navy blue skirt I had brought with me and sat by the window
enjoying the much more pleasant landscape composed mainly of forests. Once in a
while, a house made of wood come along and trash could be seen burning at the
edge of the town.

By 8:20 am, Elvira hadn’t shown up with our breakfast, so I
had no choice but to run the gauntlet of smokers once again only to find Elvira fast
asleep as she had had to stay up late taking care of customers that came to the
dining car to drink. She appeared totally exhausted and that made me feel
worse. I told her not to worry about it, but she insisted on sending the
breakfast as soon as she could.

A young man came with the tray. We were hoping that Elvira would
come by to pick it so we could provide her with the tip, but neither one of
them ever returned, and I wasn’t about to make that walk again.

The new passengers on the upper berth appeared to be a man
and his young daughter. He smoked like a chimney while she played with her cell
phone. It started to rain as we approached Moscow and we got into a cavernous
train station where we asked for Wi-Fi so I could retrieve Irina’s directions.
We were directed to a minuscule food court where I ordered a beer to quench my
thirst and obtained the password.

We couldn’t make heads or tails of the train system and didn’t
realize the metro and suburban trains run from the same station. I opted for
asking a well-dressed woman if she spoke English and to our relief she did. This
woman made sure we got on the right train after buying the tickets for us,
asked a fellow passenger who was heading in the same direction to let us know
where to get off, and called Irina to her let her know we were on our way. Ah,
the kindness of strangers.

The ride took fifty minutes and the view outside was mostly
that of ugly high rises and advertising billboards. Across the station we
stopped, a church was being reconstructed after the Soviet years when it had
been turned into a market.

Irina was waiting at the metro station with her young
daughter and drove us in her car to her parents’ dacha where after showing us
the place, we sat down to eat a bit of fish and rice. She was marinating pork
chunks for a barbecue, but wanted to wait for her friend Galina. We sat under
the gazebo where the mosquitoes promptly started feasting on me, so when the
rain really picked up, Irina suggested going inside to eat and we were more
than happy to comply.

Irina’s father was in the hospital for testing related to a
kidney condition he’s fighting, and so we didn’t have a chance to meet him. The
family seemed very happy with the four jars of jam we’ve brought them along
with the bag of dried apricots.

Once the meal was over, Irina took us for a drive around her
neighborhood and fortunately the rain stopped long enough to allow me to take a
few pictures. I fell asleep on the way back even though I had started feeling a
bit of low back pain, something rather unusual for me.

Irina’s city featured wide boulevards, clean streets,
orderly traffic and lots of flower beds. It was the beginning of the famed “white
nights” and it was still light outside at 11:00 pm.

We were occupying Irina’s daughter’s bedroom, and so I got
the top bunk bed.